It has no fuselage, no fin and no tailplane, and it looks like something from the 1980s rather than 1945. The Horten Ho 229 is one of the most photographed German aircraft of the Second World War, and it is usually described as the world’s first jet-powered flying wing. It is also routinely called “Hitler’s stealth fighter”. The first description is fair. The second is not.

A popular post currently circulating gets most of the history right: Walter and Reimar Horten, Göring’s “3×1000” requirement, the plywood skin, the fatal crash in February 1945 and the surviving prototype in the Smithsonian. Where it goes too far is in the Ho 229’s link to modern stealth and to the B-2. Here is the full story.

Two brothers and an all-wing idea

Walter and Reimar Horten became fascinated by the flying wing as teenagers in the early 1930s, building gliders at a time when the Treaty of Versailles restricted German military aviation and the state encouraged gliding clubs instead. Their logic was aerodynamic. A pure flying wing has no fuselage or tail to create drag, so every part of the aircraft can contribute lift. By the early 1940s they had flown a series of tailless gliders, among them the H.IV, which performed remarkably well.

In 1943 Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, asked for a bomber able to carry 1,000 kilograms of bombs over 1,000 kilometres at 1,000 kilometres per hour: the “3×1000” requirement. The new jet engines had the speed, but they burned fuel so quickly that no conventional airframe could meet the range. The Hortens argued that their ultra-low-drag flying wing could. Göring was impressed and backed three prototypes, at a cost of 500,000 Reichsmarks.

Steel, plywood and two Jumo 004s

Germany in 1944 was short of aluminium and skilled labour, so the H.IX, as the Hortens called it, used what was available. The centre section was a welded steel-tube frame carrying the cockpit, the two Junkers Jumo 004 turbojets (the same engines as the Me 262) and the landing gear. The wings were built largely of wood, with a skin of plywood glued in layers. Instead of a rudder the aircraft used drag spoilers near the wingtips for yaw control.

The first prototype, the H.IX V1, was an unpowered glider. It flew on 1 March 1944 and handled well. Because the Hortens had no factory of their own, series development went to Gothaer Waggonfabrik, and the aircraft received the official designation Ho 229 (Gotha’s involvement is why it is also known as the Go 229). Göring ordered a production series before the jet version had even flown.

Three flights

The jet-powered V2 made its first flight at Oranienburg on 2 February 1945, flown by Leutnant Erwin Ziller, and flew again soon after. On the third flight, on 18 February 1945, one of the engines failed. Witnesses saw Ziller dive and pull up several times, apparently trying to restart it, before the aircraft crashed just outside the airfield. Ziller died of his injuries and the V2 was destroyed. Accounts differ on whether the engine caught fire or simply flamed out.

That was the end of the Ho 229 as a flying aircraft. The V3, larger and intended as the template for pre-production fighters armed with two 30 mm MK 108 cannon, was still unfinished at Gotha’s workshop in Friedrichroda when troops of General Patton’s Third Army overran it in April 1945. The quoted top speed of around 960 km/h is a design estimate: no Ho 229 ever demonstrated it.

The stealth myth

The “stealth fighter” story began decades later. In 1983, after details of American stealth research had become public, Reimar Horten claimed he had intended to mix charcoal dust into the wood glue to absorb radar waves. No wartime documents support the claim, and the V3 itself does not bear it out.

In 2008 Northrop Grumman built a full-size, non-flying reproduction of the V3 for a National Geographic documentary and tested it on its radar range in California. The results were modest. Against the wartime British Chain Home radar, a Ho 229 flying low over the Channel would still have been detected at about 80 percent of the distance of a Messerschmitt Bf 109. Northrop engineers who also tested a sample of the V3’s layered wood nose cone were blunt about the supposed radar-absorbing material.

In other words, the Ho 229’s shape made it somewhat harder to see on radar than a conventional twin-engined aircraft of its time, as any smooth, tailless wing would be. But that was a by-product of chasing low drag, not a design goal, and it came nowhere near modern stealth.

Did it lead to the B-2?

This is the claim that most needs correcting. The B-2 Spirit does look like a descendant of the Ho 229, but its family tree runs through California, not Thuringia. Jack Northrop was building and flying flying wings at the same time as the Hortens: the N-1M in 1940, the N-9M in 1942, the piston-engined XB-35 bomber in 1946 and the jet-powered YB-49 in 1947. When Northrop designed the B-2 in the late 1970s and 1980s, it drew on that heritage and on computing and radar-absorbing materials that did not exist in 1945.

The Hortens and Northrop reached similar shapes because they were solving the same aerodynamic problem. The Ho 229 is a remarkable parallel to the American flying wings, and it flew as a jet more than two years before the YB-49. It is not, however, the B-2’s parent.

The survivor

The V3 was shipped to the United States after the war with other captured German aircraft and ended up with the Smithsonian, where it spent decades in storage at the Paul E. Garber facility in Maryland. In 2012 it moved to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia for detailed study, and in 2014 into the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar for conservation. Today it is the only Ho 229 airframe in existence: rusted steel, delaminating plywood and two jet engines, from an aircraft that was far ahead of its time aerodynamically and far behind the war.

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Horten Ho 229 V3 collection record and conservation project; Smithsonian Air & Space magazine, “Restoring Germany’s Captured Bat Wing”; Northrop Grumman / National Geographic, Hitler’s Stealth Fighter (2009); Wikipedia, “Horten Ho 229” and “Northrop YB-49”.